Healthcare

Biography

Abstract

The healthcare sector contributes more than 10% of gross domestic product (GDP) in most developed countries. This sector assigns approximately 18% of New Zealand 2018 budget to itself, after social development, which indicates its importance. Growing medical expenses, over diagnosing, and clinical errors are major issues for governments and the public necessitates the need for effective management of supply and demand. Additionally, increase in capacity usage and demand in one hand, and workforce and population aging, in another hand, resluted in critical problem for medical centres. Indeed, in most countries, New Zealand in particular, the current situation of health care providers is no longer an all-time feasible solution necessitating decision making in operational and tactical levels to cope with different issues.

 

Emergency department (ED) is one of the most challenging parts in a medical center as it faces high unpredictable demand and complexity in its every moment of performance. Managing such a complex and uncertain environment to save people’s lives is difficult. In almost all studies in this area, researchers have tried to find the optimal assignment of different resources such as physicians, nurses, beds, and other equipment to meet the patients’ uncertain demand considering time and cost constraints. However, in this paper we aim to consider the managerial aspects of resource allocation between triage and ED, from New Zealand healthcare industry perspective.  

 

In this study, first, we provided a structural literature review to investigate research stream on nursing at emergency departments. Subsequently, we named different factors to identify optimal team composition according between team members to improve not only nurse utilization but also patient's outcomes. Our case study would be the ED of MiddleMore Hospital, the biggest public hospital in Auckland. So, this paper aims to answer the following questions;

 

• Question one:

• How “team composition” lead to improve nurses’ outcome in terms of less error and better diagnosis? (Strategies to Make Optimal Team Composition to Improve Nurses’ Outcomes)

• Question two:

• How the optimal team composition (identified in the first question) leads to maximizing patient’s outcome in terms of minimizing service time and waiting time? (Strategies to Make Optimal Team Composition to Improve Patients’ Outcomes)

• Question three:

• What are the recommendations for the EDs to use the optimal team composition as a leverage to increase both patient outcomes and nurse collaboration in the EDs?